SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Brian Bushong, Senior Account Executive, American Digital Corporation

Brian is a “customer first” sales executive who has been building relationships with Fortune 1000 companies since 2002. Brian’s expertise is working with C-Level executives and their teams to design, deploy and implement IT solutions that leverage the newest technologies including Composable Infrastructure, Intelligent Edge and IoT.

Brian’s passion is working with clients to leverage these technologies to design the ideal enterprise infrastructure to support mission critical applications which include ERP solutions like SAP HANA. As Brian likes to say about his colleagues at American Digital: “ we are Great people, with a Great approach that deliver superior results on high-impact/profile projects”.

Robert Christiansen, VP, Client Advocate – Office of the CTO, HPE

Robert Christiansen leads technology evangelism for HPE, helping clients and partners clearly understand HPE’s value and helping HPE truly understand client problems. He is a key member of the Office of the CTO for Hybrid IT, a contributing author to multiple technology publications including CIO magazine and The Doppler. Robert is a popular international speaker and regularly hosts workshops and seminars dedicated to executive alignment and strategy.

Prior to joining HPE, Robert co-founded Cloud Nation, the first Citrix DaaS platform on AWS, and established many of the reproducible architectures for DaaS on AWS. Robert is a prolific author, contributing a large number of cloud and IT transformation articles to CTP’s Doppler Quarterly publications, distributed to 8,000+ IT professionals and business leaders. He has also recorded podcasts and videos focusing on cloud-related best practices and has contributed to mentoring, coaching and leadership publications.

Marc Kreppel, Area Manager, Zerto

Marc has over 20 years of experience helping companies best leverage technology to achieve measurable business outcomes. Since starting a consulting business while in college, Marc developed passion for enabling client success and growth through adoption of technical solutions. He gained manufacturer and integrator solution selling expertise in the New York metro enterprise sales and financial services accounts. Marc’s focus on performance and cost optimization of technical solutions has fostered his success with excellent communication, relationships, and sales execution to support clients’ needs.

Tom McKowen, Executive Consultant, US Signal

Tom is an executive-level consultant who helps devise client IT strategies that support transformational change inside organizations. He works alongside CIO’s, CTO’s, CISO’s and their teams, by establishing and maintaining a company’s vision and strategy to ensure information assets and technologies are adequately protected and disaster recovery and business continuity plans are in place to reduce an organization’s operational risks.

Tom has a solid IT background with a primary focus on, Healthcare, Commercial Enterprise and Financial verticals. In the ever-changing IT world, he monitors and evaluates existing and new technologies and processes, keeping clients up-to-date with technology advancements that facilitate maximum value towards transformational change for their business.

Tom has a 25 year background as a technology practitioner and has led change in banking, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing industries. Prior to joining US Signal, Tom’s latest position was VP of Information Technology and Enterprise Architect for a large publicly traded financial institution.

Derek Milroy, Information Security, U.S. Cellular

Derek has been implementing security in corporate environments, as both an internal employee and a consultant, for five years. Although he has implemented firewalls, IDSs, and VPNs for various employers and clients he focuses heavily on securing Microsoft hosts and Domain structures. He has hardened hundreds of hosts in environments ranging from less than a dozen servers to enterprise environments with over 1000 servers and thousands of users. In conjunction with hardening he has also crafted and implemented standards, policies, and procedures to maintain the security of his employer’s / client’s environments.

David Musci, Director of Cloud Engineering, Hitachi Vantara

David Musci is a Director of Cloud Engineering at Hitachi Vantara.  He brings over 20 years of combined experience as a cloud architect, Oracle DBA, Linux administrator, and developer. He is also an AWS certified Solutions Architect. In his role at Hitachi Vantara, David has been the principal architect for a number of high-profile projects for customers such as US Transportation Command, Symantec, Informatica, Maersk Drilling, Citi Technology Group, and Deloitte.

Prior to joining Hitachi Vantara, David worked extensive in the telecommunications industry, working with AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and many others providers around the world. While working in the telecom industry, he developed highly scalable batch and online real-time payment processing solutions, as well as integrated numerous COTS products supporting network provisioning, operations, billing, accounting, finance, and CRM.

Ryan Nikolich, Director of Network Administration, Pepper Construction Group

Ryan is an experienced System And Network Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the construction industry. He is a strong cyber security based information technology professional skilled in Networking, Project Management, NIST, Budgeting, Value Engineering, with and excellent attitude and outstanding work ethic.

Ryan is a dedicated volunteer for multiple non for profit foundations including; Ducks Unlimited ( Illinois Newsletter Chairman). He’s on Team Carone Foundation (Technical liaison). He is passionate about Cyber Security and information technology. 

Irene Oh, Head of IT, Museum of Science and Industry

Irene Oh is currently Head of IT at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. With over 20 years in IT, Irene has broad experience in IT enterprise infrastructure, public cloud deployments, cybersecurity, and systems implementation and integration. Previous to MSI, Irene held multiple roles within the public and private sectors. Irene is ITIL certified and serves on the Board for the Cloud Security Alliance Chicagoland chapter.

Ryan F. O’Halloran, Chief Technology Officer, Access One, Inc.

Ryan O’Halloran has over 12 years of experience in the technology services industry including Solutions Architect at Mindsight and IT Director for Framework Communications. Ryan has held numerous industry certifications in the practice of Networking, Datacenter, Cloud Services, Strategic Consulting and Cybersecurity. He currently holds the Global Information Assurance Certification for Strategic Policy, Planning and Leadership (GSTRT) and acts as a CISO consulting executive. 

Kumail Razvi, Sr. Manager – Cloud Data Engineering, Discover Financial

Kumail Razvi is a Senior Cloud Foundations Manager at Discover Financial Services with oversight of data platform operations for analytics functions. He has lead lift & shift and redesign cloud migrations initiatives. His previous background includes system administration, database administration and software development. He is also an Adjunct Faculty member at DePaul University teaching E-Commerce and Information Technology courses. He is a founding member and Director of a private Elementary & Middle School in Schaumburg as well as an activist for heritage preservation.

Michael Rymkiewicz, Vice President, Dito

Mike brings extensive background in Technology Sales and Leadership experience to Dito. He has experience in operating Global Businesses, leading teams across various geographies and responsibility over global expansion. Over his career, Michael has built and grown sales teams for early stage companies to large technology companies. Mike will be responsible for New Business Sales execution for Dito. Previously, his experience includes background in Data Center, Analytics, Hybrid and Public Cloud, AI, IoT and Enterprise Software with Amazon AWS, Google, VMware and Oracle. Michael lives in Denver.

Jim Schuyler, Inside Solution Architect, US Signal

As an Inside Solution Architect for US Signal, Jim enjoys crafting and refining solutions to address the unique challenges faced by our customers. Jim is fascinated by and focused on IT resiliency, security, virtualization, and automation. In his nearly nine-year tenure with the organization, Jim has worn many hats, including stints with US Signal’s Operations and Cloud Engineering, and Professional Services groups.

Nisar Syed, Director, Service Delivery, Blue Cross Blue Shield Association

Nisar Syed is currently Director of Enterprise IT Service Delivery for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA), a national federation of 36 independent, community-based and locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies. The Blue System is the nation’s largest health insurer covering one-in-three Americans.

Nisar has over 20 years experience in the IT industry, majority of which has been in the Healthcare & Life Sciences area. Currently he manages teams with responsibility for Mission Critical Infrastructure both in traditional on-prem Data Centers and in the cloud.

My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nisars

Doug Zelinka, Executive Global Director, Infrastructure & Service Delivery, Akorn Pharmaceuticals

Innovative senior IT leader with a development background and 20 years of experience transforming IT from cost center to business value engine in multiple industries. Technically diverse, leading teams as high as 35, managed budgets to $15M. Proven track record developing, mentoring, and empowering high performance teams that talented people want to join. Excels making IT a cost-effective, competitive advantage.